So I have this thought about how to incentivize Sansar growth. I woke up with it this morning and it has been nagging the back of my brain ever since. I am going to throw it out there a couple times today to gage thoughts. While I think the current 10k prizes for creating great content is awesome, I am not sure that it is sustainable or that you get the most bang for your buck. The more I think about it, I think there is a gap in the Sansar economic model.
If you are a prop or asset creator you can make money from the store. If you are an experience builder, you have to pay to build your experience and buy Sansars to get things from the store for your experience, with no way to recoup your expense of time and effort but a slim shot at a huge prize. With that, I think Linden should pay in Sansars for the top experiences. So if your experience is in the top ten you get 25 Sansars a vist. In the top 100 you get 10 Sansars per visit. This gives experience builders some incentive to build better experiences. It gives experience builders Sansars to spend on all the awesome stuff in the Sansar store and it gives folks a reason to advertise their experience and market Sansar to the broader VR community, because more visits = more Sansars. Eventually this model could be turned over to the community by creating a 25 Sansar Fee to visit the top ten experiences or a 10 Sansar Fee to visit the top 100 and Linden wouldn’t have to subsidize anymore.

What do you think of David’s idea? Sound off here in the comments, or join us on Discord!

I think the first thought about LL rewarding the Experience creator might have some merit.
I also tend to agree with the previous comment made by Lord though, and think Experiences should be free to access for visitors.

It might work for Sansar to let creators sell whole experiences with sets of objects: buildings, plants, terrain,several sky boxes. It would be like the Highland starter experience that would allow the buyer to get a fast start on creating there own experience with a unique scheme.

Actually, his suggestion was that LL should subsidize the top experiences, not that visitors should pay.

This is equivalent to Second Life’s “dwell” program that was created early on and eventually phased out because of “camping” and related abuses. It worked very well to incentivize the creation and maintenance of some excellent regions by super creative people who were not really good at marketing themselves.

I think I agree that spending tens of thousands of dollars on a small number of winners is probably not the best bang for their buck. I don’t think pay-per-visit is a good idea, though, because of the abusive campaigns people will go on to garner artificial visits. However, paying a stipend for experiences LL deems worthy of featuring seems a good idea. It wouldn’t even have to be much. Imagine just S$100 per week to the owners of the 70-ish featured experiences now would end up costing US $70 per week or $3,640 per year. Even bumping that up to S$1,000 per week for the top 10 would only add $90 per week for a total of $8,320 per year for the program with the current cadre of experiences. Of course, if that grows, the cost grows. But this is still less than the top prize in each of the previous and current contests and ignores all the other prize payouts. And it would impact 70 creators instead of a much smaller group.

Then again, the upshot of large cash prizes is that it provides a strong incentive for some very driven creators to go for it. Don’t underestimate the power of that.